‘The Crown’ review: The death of Princess Diana opens the Netflix series’ final season
Season 6 of “The Crown” begins in Paris, the city where Princess Diana was assassinated. It’s late at night, and the streets are deserted except for a man walking his dog near the Pont de l’Alma tunnel. A Mercedes suddenly passes by. Several motorcycles then follow. A crash is heard, followed by the distant sound of a car horn blaring, which then blends subtly into the opening title music of the show.
It’s an unexpectedly elegant choice for a show that has previously favored the more straightforwardly pedestrian. The first four episodes of the final season, which Netflix is releasing in two parts, are about the events leading up to that fateful summer of 1997.
Imelda Staunton as Queen Elizabeth, Jonathan Pryce as Prince Philip, Dominic West as Prince Charles, Khalid Abdalla as Dodi Fayed, and Elizabeth Debicki as Princess Diana, who spent much of her final summer on a yacht in the Mediterranean as a guest of Dodi’s father, Mohamed Al-Fayed (Salim Daw), return from Season 5.
The show’s creator, Peter Morgan, laid the groundwork for Mohamed’s grasping aspirations for royal proximity last season. Now that Diana has divorced Charles, Mohamed sees an opportunity and encourages his son to seize it. If Dodi marries Diana, the family’s prestige and influence will rise.
Despite Mohamed’s hopes, it’s just a summer fling between two wealthy jetsetters. It begins in relative privacy, only to be shattered when the paparazzi get photos of them together. This is where Morgan makes some intriguingly tangled conjectures: What if it was Mohamed who tipped off the paparazzi?
Morgan then takes it a step further. What if, once the couple arrives in Paris, Mohamed’s continued meddling only aggravates the ravenous press pack, eventually killing them? Diana’s fears that Mohamed was spying on her and had the yacht bugged are absent (as her sister testified at the inquest). However, the father-son dynamic is engrossingly fraught, and Abdalla is particularly effective as a spineless ne’er-do-well at the mercy of a controlling father. How commanding? We see a portrait of him painted to look like a pharaoh, possibly a sly reference by Morgan to the media’s frequent dismissal of Al-Fayed as a “phony pharaoh.”
Dodi is the perpetual disappointment who has been living off his father’s money, and Diana expresses her feelings about him when they dine privately at the Ritz in Paris just hours before the crash. Finally, a scene that is allowed to breathe in a show that spends an unusual amount of time reducing its narrative to phone calls. This is a complicated dance between these two, and Morgan imagines Diana performing it with skill and empathy.
Morgan has finally caught up to the events depicted in his 2006 film “The Queen,” which focused on the immediate aftermath of Diana’s death, when Queen Elizabeth had to be coaxed into a public display of mourning.
If you’re wondering if he found a way to avoid repeating himself, Morgan shrugs and replays a lot of it. But he’s lost interest in the Tony Blair aspect of it all.
Blair provided a necessary counterweight in the film; his continued perplexity in the face of the family’s baroque dysfunction is a commentary in and of itself. Which could explain why the show has always felt narratively sluggish and self-important in comparison.
The royals are portrayed in the show as if they are trapped in a gilded cage, rather than as deeply strange people who can and should be held accountable for their decisions. They are all stuck in limbo, their trauma wrapped in bubble wrap. But “The Crown” says nothing about the corruption that benefits everyone and is maintained by the monarchy itself. It, like “Succession,” criticizes individuals but not the systems they enforce and exploit.
The subtext of the film is that a royal family coexisting with an elected government is a farce. Much of that has been walked back through the TV series. The film made its points. Morgan doesn’t seem interested any longer.
The remaining episodes will air next month and will follow the British royals through 2005, including Charles and Camilla’s wedding (the next step in Charles’ obsessive focus on “Camilla’s campaign for legitimacy,” as he calls it) and the early days of Prince William’s relationship with future wife Kate Middleton.
Morgan devotes an inordinate amount of time to Mohamed Al-Fayed’s marriage planning. It’s reasonable to wonder if he sees Kate’s mother, Carole Middleton, in the same light. They are mirror images of one another as parents. That irony is enticing enough to give the series something meaty to sink its teeth into.
Will Morgan visit there? The only way to know is to wait and see.
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SEASON 6 OF ‘THE CROWN’
2.5 out of 4 stars
TV-MA is the rating.
Netflix is the best place to watch it.
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